The Fantasy-Faction Anthology

It is with great pleasure that I release to you today the news that Fantasy-Faction is releasing an Anthology.

Wow, I can’t tell you how great it is to say those words; releasing an Anthology. Just over a year ago I, Marc Aplin, started a fantasy blog in order to share my love of fantasy literature with people throughout the world. I named it Fantasy-Faction with the following definition in mind:
A group of people, who express a shared belief or opinion different from people who are not part of that group.

This is because, although the site started a personal blog where I reviewed the books I was reading at the time, I wanted to grow the site into a community. This community would be one that shared a love and a passion for fantasy literature and the people who visited would be cool people, friendly, sociable and generally wanting to converse with one another. I thought this would take at least half a decade, I never thought that just one year later we would have close to 50 members of staff, nearly 400 articles, interviews with the likes of Patrick Rothfuss, Douglas Hulick, Elspeth Cooper, Scott Lynch, Jon Sprunk, Peter V. Brett, Joe Abercrombie – *big breath* – Richard Morgan, Chris Evans, Mira Grant, Paul Evanby, Blake Charlton, Mark Charan Newton, Sam Sykes, Mark Lawrence, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Brandon Sanderson, Guy Gavriel Kay, China Miéville, Rowena Cory Daniells and many more besides – WOW!

In short, this year has been the most productive in my life and I wouldn’t have changed a moment of it. The site has become so popular that on a bad day we get around 1,200 hits. On a good day we have hit upwards of 7,000. Those numbers are not only impressive and heartwarming, but damned scary! A problem that did arise with being so popular and was: costs. The cost of running such a huge website, paying people to work on logos, purchasing books, travelling to conventions and so on did add up.

Most expensive was the server costs and when that bill hit we were forced to ask the users of our sites for donations. Now, I thought our request for help would simply be ignored – but no – I underestimated the generosity of our community and I was completely humbled by the amount of people who donated and the generous sums they sent us. I would like to take a moment now just to say thank you once more to all these kind people who handed us money and asking nothing in return, but for our site to continue on.

Now, we do not EVER want to do that again. I want people to come to Fantasy-Faction and I want them to use it for free. With that in mind, we needed a plan. How on Earth could we make such a massive website self-sufficient? Well, we have a huge user base, all of which are readers who like reading fantasy and writing fiction. What if we could provide these readers and writers with and something that they could read, but also that they could write for? Rather than having to ask for donations, we could ask our users and readers of fantasy in general to support Fantasy-Faction by buying this Anthology. Not only did we believe that we could provide them with something phenomenal, but we believed there was a market for it.

This is what the anthology will contain:

– A fantasy writing contest where 6 winners will not only find a spot within the anthology, but also win some great prizes.

– Short stories by some of the fantasy genres biggest names, such as: Myke Cole, Mark Lawrence, Jon Sprunk, Michael J. Sullivan, Adrian Tchaikovsky and more to be announced!

– Articles written by fantasy writers and industry experts.

The Fantasy Writing Contest will be held annually and we truly believe that it could end up being one of the industry’s most recognised events in a few years time. Short stories must be within the fantasy genre (whether that is epic, sword and sorcery, modern, urban or steampunk though is up to you) and of no more than 8,000 words. Essentially, what we want to do is to give new and previously undiscovered writers the chance to showcase their talent. Perhaps the writer has not been brave enough to send their work off before or maybe they’ve just not quite found the right place to submit their short story too. This could well be their opportunity to get out there, get noticed and feature alongside some of the industries greats.

In order to achieve this we are ready to work our behinds off promoting the writing contest, speaking to authors, speaking with people within the industry, working with cover artists and generally bringing everything together. We know it is going to be hard work and we know at times we are going to have to remind ourselves why we are doing this – to keep, what we consider, one of the finest fantasy resources and communities online and free to use for our thousands of daily users.

Now, as for dates. This is our first anthology and so we really wanted to make sure we gave ourselves enough time to make things perfect. The contest will open on February 1st and will run through until June 30th. That means that you guys will have five months to submit your entries and we will have around six months to edit everything before sending it to the printers for a January 2013 release.

So yes, we hope you are feeling as excited as we are. In just under a year’s time we will have a Fantasy-Faction Anthology that you could well be appearing in! For more information and to enter the writing contest you can visit our forum.

Thank you once again everyone for supporting Fantasy-Faction up until now and we hope you continue to support us by getting involved in the anthology and, dare we be cheeky and suggest, buying a copy upon its release.

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